Stars have a life cycle: they’re born, they pass through middle age, and they die. The birth of a star determines much of how it lives that life. For that reason, researchers study star-forming ...

Large galaxies like the Milky Way formed out of mergers with smaller galaxies and by stealing some of their stars. Astronomers discovered that as many as 25% of galaxies are currently merging with ...

Stars are often gregarious things. Based on observation and theoretical models, many stars are born in clusters — groups of ten or more stars that were formed from the same interstellar cloud. The ...

Humans have studied the stars for thousands of years. To many cultures, stars were the metaphor for constancy, while everything else moved and changed. Modern stellar astronomy showed that stars do ...

From its establishment in 1966 as the Smithsonian Mount Hopkins Observatory, FLWO has hosted a world-class suite of telescopes designed for a wide variety of purposes. The largest visible-light ...

How can we expand the limits of human knowledge further into the unknown? The Center for Astrophysics is a collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Harvard College ...

Cambridge, MA - The missing ingredient for cooking up stars has been spotted for the first time by astronomers. Much like a pressure cooker has a weight on top of its lid to keep the pressure in, ...

Everything you’ve ever seen or experienced on Earth was once a nebulous collection of floating gas and dust. Science is starting to understand how those particles came to take the forms you recognize ...

Dr. Fred Lawrence Whipple, was one of the last giants of 20th century astronomy. He was Phillips Professor of Astronomy Emeritus at Harvard University and a Senior Physicist at SAO. A discoverer of ...

Venus blazes at its brightest for the year after sunset, then Mars and Jupiter to rule the night amid the menagerie of bright winter stars. The Moon’s many engagements, what’s the right term for a ...

Along with the major planets — Earth, Jupiter, and so forth — the Solar System is home to many small bodies including asteroids, comets, Kuiper Belt objects like Pluto, and their satellites. While the ...

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian High Energy Astrophysics division focuses on X-ray astronomy and instrumentation involved in observations of high-energy sources. This research aims ...